Today’s novelists must log on to the internet

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Human nature is changing fast. It’s no good having fiction that’s still stuck in the 19th century

Poor reader. How will you make it through the 850 words of this article, scattered as you are by social media, and saddled with an attention span more usually associated with hummingbird hawk-moths? That, at least, is what some of our leading novelists make of you. Tim Parks, author of the Booker-shortlisted Europa, worries that you are ill-equipped to cope with long sentences, let alone long books. In an article for last week’s New York Review of Books, he warned that the very words are falling out of our vision as we read because of too much time spent skimming